Draft – Please do not cite without permission
Douglas - 17
collectively addressed this question, offering a premature consensus which does not stand up
well to scrutiny.
My complaint is made more explicit by using an example. Since Robert Pape’s Bombing
to Win is perhaps the best known and most widely cited contemporary scholarly work on air
power, it is a natural starting point. Making the choice more appealing, Pape has recently
extended his findings from Bombing to Win’s to the host of post-1991 cases.
23
Part of the
article’s problems stem from the lack of a well developed theoretical competitor, which naturally
leads to stretching inherited categories to cover new phenomena, if for no other reasons than the
fact there is no benchmark for comparison. In this sense, Pape and his conclusion may be
singled out for proximate criticism, but the far larger portions of the academic community could
share in the indirect blame for failing to create a full competitor to Bombing to Win. However,
even bearing this point in mind, there is more to criticize in Pape’s recent conclusions than the
poor relative fit of some of the categories.
In his latest article, Pape comes closer to discussing regime targeting than ever before,
making the false promise of decapitation his first major point. As in other settings, the analysis
is somewhat skewed by treating decapitation mostly as brute force assassination. Far more
importantly, the analysis of effectiveness is skewed by using the same standards whether the war
is a coercive one of limited aims or a total one for regime change.
Moving to Pape’s more recent conclusions; he writes, “The strategy of enemy
decapitation has inherent shortcomings, which precision technology, for all its advantages,
cannot overcome. U.S. forces have tried the strategy on six occasions in the past 16 years, and it
either failed or backfired every time.”
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The problems of Pape’s approach become more
apparent when moving to a discussion of particular cases. Speaking specifically of Kosovo,
Pape lists it as one an instance in which:
decapitation tactics have proven downright counterproductive….In March 1999, in an
attempt to strong-arm Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic into adopting a more
forthcoming policy toward ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the United States launched what
was supposed to be a three-day air campaign against 51 targets in and near Belgrade. Not
23
Robert Pape, “The True Worth of Air Power,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2004) vol. 83, no.
2, 116-130.
24
Pape, “True Worth of Air Power,” 117.
Convention